Trends in skill bias and greater turbulence in modern labor markets put wages and employment prospects of unskilled workers under pressure. Weak incentives to utilize and maintain skills over the life-cycle become manifest with the ageing of the population. Reinvention of human capital policies...

Patterns of informal care are documented throughout the day with Dutch time use diary data. The diary data enable us to identify a, so far overlooked, source of opportunity costs of informal care, i.e. the necessity to perform particular tasks of informal care at specific moments of the day....

This paper evaluates the UK New Deal for Lone Parents (NDLP) program, which aims to return lone parents to work. Using rich administrative data on benefit receipt histories and a "selection on observed variables" identification strategy, we find that the program modestly reduces benefit receipt...

We examine the effect of the replacement rule of a social insurance system on sickness absence. The elasticity of absence with respect to the benefit level is a critical parameter in defining the optimal sickness insurance scheme. A pre-determined, piecewise linear policy rule in which the...

This study looks at the effect of welfare programs on work incentives and the adult labor supply in developing countries. The analysis builds on the experimental evaluations of three programs implemented in rural areas: Mexico's PROGRESA, Nicaragua's RPS and Honduras' PRAF. Comparable results...

We study the job training provided under the US Workforce Investment Act (WIA) to adults and dislocated workers in two states. Our substantive contributions center on impacts estimated non-experimentally using administrative data. These impacts compare WIA participants who do and do not receive...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate a recent Swedish in-work tax credit reform where we pay particular attention to labor market exclusion; i.e. individuals in as well as outside the labor force are included in the analysis. To highlight the importance of the joint effects from the tax and...

In this paper we propose a tax and benefit reform to increase the working hours and to decrease the welfare participation of single mothers in Sweden. We have access to highquality tax and income data, and use a detailed tax-benefit program to generate precise budget-sets. We formulate and...

Protected areas represent a powerful policy tool for the preservation of ecosystems and their services. The rapid proliferation of protected areas in Bolivia over the past several decades has prompted interest in understanding their impacts on surrounding populations. Recent studies from other...

It is often argued that the high level of welfare claims in Germany causes little incentive for workers with low productivity to seek for a job. We examine the influence of the ratio between estimated potential labor income and the welfare payment level on the probability of leaving social...